Eva K. Lee

Eva Kwok-Yin Lee is an American applied mathematician and operations researcher who applies combinatorial optimization and systems biology to the study of health care decision making and organizational transformation.. She was the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair from 2017-2019. She is Director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Health since 1999. She is also a professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology and currently on administrative leave. She pled guilty to two counts of falsifying supporting documents for a grant in December 2019 and became a convicted felon in August 2020, when she was sentenced to ten months probation and two months of home confinement.[1]

Education and career

Lee graduated from Hong Kong Baptist University in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.[2] She completed her Ph.D. in 1993 in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University. Her dissertation, Solving Structured 0/1 Integer Programs Arising from Truck Dispatching Scheduling Problems, was supervised by Robert E. Bixby.[3]

She joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 1997, after previously working in industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University[4] as the first female faculty in 1994. While at Columbia, she took a leave of absence and joined The Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) as an NSF/NATO postdoctoral fellow in Scientific Computing in 1995.

Contributions

Lee's work has included collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on defenses against pandemic and biological weapons, travel to Japan to develop rapid responses to radiation exposure and poisoning from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the optimization of influenza vaccines based on data to how people respond to the vaccines, the early detection of chronic diseases,[5] and personalized treatment design for cancer, diabetes and other diseases[6].

Lee partners with business leaders to develop novel transformational strategies in delivery, quality, safety, operations efficiency, information management, change management and organizational learning.  Lee’s research focuses on mathematical programming, information technology, game theory, networks, machine learning and computational algorithms for risk assessment, decision making, predictive analytics and knowledge discovery, and systems and performance optimization.  She has made major contributions in advances to business operations transformation, biomedicine and clinical research, emergency response and disaster preparedness, and healthcare operations.  Her homeland security work has focused on risk assessment and protection of critical infrastructures, including healthcare, supply-chain and logistics, power plants, communication, and finance.

Since January 2020, Lee has been working with federal, state and local leaders on covid-19 containment and mitigation, strategic testing, medical and personnel surge, resource allocation, reopening operations logistics, treatment prediction and outcome analysis, and vaccine prioritization and distribution. [7]  

Lee has published over 220 research articles, and 50 government and state reports, and has received patents on innovative medical systems and devices. She is frequently tapped by a variety of health and security policymakers in Washington for her expertise in personalized medicine, chronic diseases, healthcare quality, modeling and decision support, vaccine research and national security, pandemic, and medical preparedness.

She is a prolific speaker, has presented over 60 keynote speeches, 80 invited tutorial/panelist, and over 1000 invited conference talks.

Government services

From 2015 to 2018, Lee served on the National Preparedness & Response Science Board.[8]  NPRSB members are vital to the operations in Department of Health and Human Services. They bring a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and experience. Over the past eight years, the board has helped the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response improve federal policies and practices in disaster preparedness and response.

The NPRSB federal advisory committee was created under the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act of 2006 and the Public Health Service Act. Since its inception, the board has provided recommendations on federal disaster preparedness and response issues. In the past year, the board has advised on modernizing and enhancing the nation’s biosurveillance capabilities and how the department and the nation can increase community health resilience. The board has 13 voting members with a broad range of expertise in science, medicine, and public health.

Lee also served as an expert science consultant on the Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health from 2014 to 2018..

She has served on NAE/NAS/IOM, NRC, NBSB, DTRA panel committees related to biological, radiological and chemical incidents, public health and medical preparedness, and healthcare systems innovation.  

Recognition

Lee received the NSF CAREER young investigator award in 1995[9]. In 1999, she was awarded the Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Research Young Investigator Award on image-guided prostate cancer treatment advances, Her work with CDC and DeKalb Public health on "”Emergency treatment response and real-time staff allocation for bioterrorism and infectious disease outbreak”" was honored the INFORMS Pierskalla Best Paper Award for research excellence in HealthCare and Management Science in 2005[10].

With Marco Zaider at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Lee was the 2007 winner of the Franz Edelman Award of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). Their work "Operations Research Answers to Cancer Therapeutics[11]” improves the survival rate of patients with prostate cancer, reduces the side effects of treatment, and reduces costs to the health care system. It was the first time that the association awarded the Edelman prize for a medical treatment. The Memorial Sloan team went on to receive the 2012 INFORMS Impact Prize[10] for their use of operations throughout the center and particularly in treating prostate cancer,.

Lee is also part of the team of investigators for the work "Systems Bology of Seasonal Influenza Vaccinations in Humans" who won the 2011 International Society of Vaccines Paper of the Year.[12]

She was elected to the 2015 class of Fellows of INFORMS, for exceptional accomplishments in OR methodologies and to OR practice in medicine, healthcare, and emergency preparedness, with successful implementations and broad impact. And in the same year her team (Georgia Tech, Emory, CDC) won the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice for their work on machine learning in vaccine immunogenicity prediction. She was listed as finalist in many other years[10].[13]

Lee, along with Brent Egan of the American Medical Association, won the first runner-up for their work on "Machine Learning: Multi-site Evidence-based Best Practice Discovery" at the 2019 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award. The study establishes interoperability among electronic medical records from 737 healthcare sites and performs machine learning for best practice discovery.

Lee was profiled as Women of O.R. in February 2019[14]. She was inducted into the College of Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2019[15] for contributions in novel cancer therapeutics, vaccine immunogenicity prediction, and public health emergency preparedness with successful implementation and broad impact.

False statements on memberships

Lee was a Co-Director for the multi-university NSF I/UCRC Center for Health Organization Transformation for 10 years.[16] The modest grant from NSF ($40,000 per year) was leveraged to build strong collaborative relationships with Atlanta healthcare centers and hospitals (members). Members provided students with first-hand clinical experience where they learnt directly on site, worked alongside nurses and physicians, observed surgeries in the operating room, documented treatment processes and patient care in the emergency department, and the intensive care units, etc.

According to NSF site[17] and court document "Multi-university Phase II and Phase III sites must have a minimum of $175,000 in cash membership fees and a minimum of three full members. After the first year of Phase II or Phase III, each site must show $175,000 minimum annually in membership fees including in-kind contributions. In-kind contributions considered to be part of the $175,000 must be approved by the Industrial Advisory Board (IAB)."

Lee's hospital members paid 50K cash to Georgia Tech in Phase II Year 1 as membership fee. They also paid for background screening, drug tests, parking, and in some cases liability insurance, and provided IDs for all participating students each year. Lee counted membership according to the NSF criteria: she counted the cash hospitals paid for in their partnership collaboration. The members also provided in-kind contributions, including hospital access, patient data, and HIPAA training that helped shape students' intellectual growth and career-preparation. The Georgia Tech team had access to over 2.7 million patient data.

The generous contribution of members helped train over 100 students with over 50% female students. Members worked with Lee and students on important hospital projects where true evidence-based health transformation was carried out. Students gain unique hands-on experience with big-data analytics and successful implementation experiences, expanding the innovation capacity of our nations' competitive workforce. Lee also sponsored 400 under-served K8-12 students on campus (> 50% female, 97% African American and Hispanic) to introduce them to center research, offer hands-on learning to gain insight into college life and STEM research experience. By all measures, the I/UCRC center led by Lee was a tremendous success in terms of its technical progress, educational value and societal impact. with numerous projects garnered practice excellence awards.

The NSF Office of Inspector General disagreed with the counting of membership, rather they considered only cash flow into Georgia Tech as membership fee.

On September 18 2019 the National Science Foundation General Council issued a final Notice of Administrative Action regarding the NSF Office of the Inspector General Report of Investigation, Unfortunately, U.S. Attorney's office refused to drop charges.

In December 2019, Lee plead guilty in the U.S. District Court to lying to National Science Foundation (NSF) investigators and falsifying membership certificate for a $40,000 NSF grant[18]. In August 2020, a federal judge gave Lee a lighter sentence than was requested by the prosecution, so that she can continue her work on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in a timely manner. Lee was sentenced to sixty days of home confinement, to start in the spring of 2021[19].

The case is unusual in three aspects: The U.S. Attorney refused to dismiss the charges. Georgia Tech denied repeated requests from top U.S. health officials to restore Lee’s access to her computers while COVID-19 raged across the country.[20] U.S. District Judge Steve Jones took the exceptional step of thanking Lee for her service to the nation and urged her to continue her important work.

gollark: Directly DM message the ubiquitous form.
gollark: Until next wednesday.
gollark: Hopefully?!
gollark: Probably.
gollark: Not THAT many.

References
  1. Rankin, Bill; Journal-Constitution, The Atlanta. "Judge thanks and sentences acclaimed GA Tech coronavirus researcher". Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved 2020-08-13.
  2. Eva Lee, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, retrieved 2019-11-18
  3. Eva K. Lee at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. For Lee's Columbia affiliation, see e.g. Gallagher, R. J.; Lee, E. K. (1997), "Mixed integer programming optimization models for brachytherapy treatment planning", Proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium, pp. 278–282, PMC 2233571, PMID 9357632
  5. Horner, Peter (April 2015), "The most interesting person in the (O.R.) world: Interview with Georgia Tech professor Eva Lee, whose applied work on biomedicine, healthcare delivery, pandemics, disaster response and other projects has global implications", OR/MS Today, 42 (2)
  6. INFORMS. "Georgia Tech Professor Eva Lee discusses Personalized medicine". INFORMS. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  7. Lipton, Eric (2020-04-11). "The 'Red Dawn' Emails: 8 Key Exchanges on the Faltering Response to the Coronavirus". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  8. www.phe.gov https://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/news/Pages/nprsb-members-2015.aspx. Retrieved 2020-08-17. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  9. "NSF Award Search: Award#9501584 - CAREER: Mixed Integer Programming-Parallelism and Applications to Statistical Analysis". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2020-08-16.
  10. INFORMS. "Eva K. Lee". INFORMS. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  11. INFORMS. "New Prostate Cancer Treatment Wins Operations Research Award for Memorial Sloan-Kettering". INFORMS. Retrieved 2020-08-16.
  12. "ISV Paper of the Year - 2011 | ISV - The International Society for Vaccines". isv-online.org. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  13. "Eva K. Lee", Recognizing Excellence: Award Recipients, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, retrieved 2019-10-18
  14. "Powerful, pragmatic pioneers | ORMS Today". pubsonline.informs.org. doi:10.1287/orms.2019.01.14/full/. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  15. "Eva K. Lee, Ph.D. COF-4072 - AIMBE". Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  16. "NSF Award Search: Award#1361532 - I/UCRC: Center for Health Organization Transformation". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  17. "Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers Program (I/UCRC)(nsf12516)". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
  18. Bill Rankin, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Why an acclaimed Georgia Tech professor is barred from her COVID-19 research". ajc.
  19. Jeffrey Mervis, Science. "Georgia Tech scientist gets lighter sentence in grant violation case because of her work on coronavirus".
  20. Rankin, Bill; Journal-Constitution, The Atlanta. "Georgia Tech continues to deny professor Lee access to fight COVID-19". ajc. Retrieved 2020-08-17.
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